Does any of these two sessions feel familiar?
1. A Coaching Moment: The Weight of Not Knowing
She came to the session carrying a quiet frustration.
She was working on something new she cared about deeply, but the response wasn’t what she’d hoped. Not bad, just no response at all, questioning if the whole thing was as good as she thought.
“I think I need to stop,” she said, voice low. “It’s been a few weeks, and nothing’s happening. I thought everyone would be as enthusiastic as me. Maybe I got it wrong.”
There was no panic in her tone, only that heavy fatigue that comes when you feel stuck between trying and giving up.
I asked her, “What do you think you’d feel if you stopped?”
“Relief,” she said immediately.
That word hung in the room. Relief.
Relief is a powerful feeling. It promises that the discomfort, the raw ache of uncertainty, will finally end if you just make the decision to act. The end of the discomfort of not knowing if you’re early, or off track, or just invisible for now.
“Tell me,” I said, “what if the relief isn’t the real answer? What if it’s just your brain’s way of wanting to close the loop?”
She looked down, “I don’t like the not knowing. The waiting. The feeling of everything being up in the air. It makes me doubt myself.”
We sat with that feeling for a moment, the ache of being in between. It’s one of the loneliest spaces there is.
I didn’t push for answers or decisions. Instead, I invited her to listen to what was emerging underneath that impatience. To pay attention to what might reveal itself if she resisted the urge to end the story before it was ready.
Over the next weeks, she stayed with the project differently. She didn’t rush for feedback or try to force clarity. She watched quietly, learned to sift the signals from the noise, and allowed space for the shape to find him.
Eventually, the silence broke, not with a sudden succes, but with a subtle shift. A few people showed up. Conversations started. The project moved.
It hadn’t changed much on paper, but everything inside it had.
The relief didn’t come from stopping.
It came from staying with the unknown long enough to see what was actually there.
2. A Coaching Moment: When the Silence Feels Like an Answer
He was in that familiar place, half in, half out of something that hadn’t yet become real, but was no longer casual.
They’d been seeing each other for a few months. Nothing was officially defined, but it wasn’t casual either. There had been real connection. Real intimacy. But lately, it had gone quiet. No conflict, no drama, just space. A few days without a reply. A missed call, not returned.
When he spoke, his voice sounded tight.
“I’m tired of this. I need to end it. I need to know where I stand.”
I didn’t interrupt.
He wasn’t asking a question. He was reaching for ground.
After a moment, I asked: “What would ending it give you right now?”
He exhaled. “I could finally stop thinking about it. I wouldn’t feel like I’m waiting.”
We sat in that for a while. The way not knowing had started to erode his sense of self. The mental stories he’d started to build just to explain the silence. The certainty he wanted was not because he wanted to leave, but because he couldn’t handle the space in between.
It wasn’t really about the other. It was about what happens when you’re in a relationship that hasn’t taken full form, and your nervous system wants closure more than it wants truth.
I asked:
“What’s the story your brain is telling you to make this feel safer?”
“What if this isn’t about her at all?”
“What becomes possible if you stop trying to resolve this today?”
He didn’t make a decision that session.
But he saw it. That what he was about to call “self-respect” was actually a strategy to escape the vulnerability of waiting. That what he framed as clarity was more like self-protection dressed up as empowerment.
He didn’t chase. But he didn’t close it either.
Instead, he chose to remain in that in-between space, open, alert, grounded. Long enough to see what was really being revealed.
And eventually, it was.
Not everything became easy. But something in his orientation shifted. He stopped needing the situation to resolve in order to feel stable. And in that space, his voice changed. He became more curious, less reactive. More honest with himself.
The outcome wasn’t the point.
The shift was that he no longer needed certainty to stay with what was real.
The Explanation: Your Mind Is Wired to Prefer Predictability, Even When It’s Wrong
We underestimate how much of our strategic thinking is shaped by something very primitive: the brain’s deep preference for predictability.
Even when vision is clear, it is easy to confuse clarity with control. One reflects direction. The other reflects the nervous system’s need for structure and a predicted outcome.
This distinction becomes critical in environments where direction is known, but the form is still evolving. Especially when decisions carry weight, outcomes are taking time, and not all facts are worked out.
There is a cognitive explanation for this. According to Compensatory Control Theory (Kay, Whitson, Gaucher, & Galinsky, 2009), when people lose a sense of order or structure, they unconsciously compensate by reinforcing belief in existing systems or structures, even if those systems are flawed or irrelevant. The motivation is not finding truth. It is finding psychological clarity.
You can see this reflex in how organisations respond uncertainty:
- Declaring a strategy ineffective because results are not immediate
- Overcommitting to the first statistics that arrive
Framing internal friction as a one-time event instead of a recurring pattern - Accelerating decision-making to avoid the discomfort of delay
- These are not failures of logic. They are default neurological responses to uncertainty.
- The mind prefers closure. But real work happens before the structure is in place.
The Function of Liminal Space
The term liminal comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. It refers to the in-between space, no longer what came before, but not yet integrated into what is next.
Originally used in anthropology to describe phases of ritual transformation, liminal space now appears in leadership, identity, product development, organizational change, and creative process.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff has explored the role of liminality in individual and cognitive development, suggesting that these transitional phases are uniquely neuroplastic. Without the constraints of fixed form, the brain is more open to new associations and learning. Gruber et al. (2014) found that curiosity activates the dopaminergic circuit and enhances memory and comprehension. Uncertainty, when metabolized well, increases adaptive thinking.
But this only happens when ambiguity is allowed to exist long enough for something original to form. Most people resolve it too early, not because clarity has arrived, but because the unknown is intolerable.
This premature closure is not just psychological. It is cultural and structural.
In business, we reward early certainty. We praise conviction, even when it is reactive. We associate speed with strength and clarity with competence. But those instincts, unchecked, often result in answers that are easy rather than accurate.
How to Recognise When You Are Reaching for Certainty
There is often a precise moment when the need for structure outweighs the potential of the unfolding process. You will feel it as relief. A temporary calming. A decision that “gets it over with.”
But that moment is rarely neutral. It is often the brain defaulting to resolution rather than insight.
To interrupt the reflex, ask:
- Am I resolving this because it is correct, or because I cannot tolerate the tension of not knowing?
- What signal might emerge if I waited?
- What is the long-term cost of being right too soon?
- What assumptions am I leaning on to justify this speed?
- What would I see differently if I were not trying to eliminate uncertainty?
If urgency is present but not clearly rooted in facts or pattern integrity, then what you are reacting to is not the external data, it is your internal architecture.
The most strategic move at that point may not be to act, but to observe more closely. To let additional data emerge before pattern-locking.
Holding the Tension
The real work, especially in times of transition, is not to eliminate ambiguity. It is to continue functioning with clarity of presence inside it.
This means resisting invented structure. It means not converting temporary unknowns into permanent narratives.
The question is not “What is the answer?” but:
- What frame am I applying without realizing it?
- What conclusions am I reaching based on the discomfort I want to avoid?
- Where am I controlling a process that actually needs space?
These are questions of attention, not just analysis. They help surface the conditions from which you are making meaning.
Ambiguity as a Strategic Tool
When uncertainty is held, not avoided, not prematurely resolved, it activates a different kind of intelligence.
Research on uncertainty tolerance confirms that people who can delay resolution engage broader cognitive networks. They access integrative thinking. They perform better in changeable environments. They update their models more fluidly and recover faster from prediction errors.
This is not passive waiting. It is active presence.
To stay in a conversation or process long enough for the full pattern to emerge, without locking it into a shape that feels safe too early, is not hesitation. It is discernment.
The cost of forced coherence is rarely immediate. But over time, it shows up in:
- Products launched too soon
- Partnerships agreed to before alignment
- Narratives imposed where reality had not yet spoken
These are not mistakes of vision. They are misreadings of timing.
Not-Knowing as a Superior Position
We tend to associate “not knowing” with hesitation. But in systems that are dynamic, distributed, and alive, knowing too soon can be far more dangerous than pausing to observe.
The challenge is that your nervous system may not reward this. It will try to compel closure.
If you can stay conscious through that pressure, to delay assigning meaning until more information arrives, you maintain access to the field of possibility.
Sometimes leadership is not about saying what the answer is. It is about creating enough space for the right answer to emerge and still recognizing it when it arrives.
That is not weakness.
That is precision.